Comment by bigmadshoe
8 hours ago
The broadly used definition of AGI has nothing to do with consciousness and consciousness emerging is irrelevant to whether a system can develop AGI.
8 hours ago
The broadly used definition of AGI has nothing to do with consciousness and consciousness emerging is irrelevant to whether a system can develop AGI.
It's funny how this definition has shifted. I feel like growing up in the 90s it was pretty clear that AGI was very related to consciousness. For instance, Commander Data in ST:TNG to pick one of 100s of popular depictions of AGI at the time.
Now the idea of AGI has been narrowed and scoped to economically viable work. Even Turing had a different idea when he asked "Can machines think?".
We lack a definition of consciousness that allows us to tell whether Data is conscious or not. Neither can we tell whether a rock is conscious or not. We believe other humans to be generally intelligent without being able to tell whether they are conscious or not therefore consciousness can’t be relevant for general intelligence.
People somehow forget how the Turing test was considered the definitive way of showing something to be "human-level consciousness".
Now programmers and mathematicians are being superseded by AI, both professions long deemed the pinnacle of human intelligence. Somehow, now plumbers occupy that spot.
How is "people not knowing what consciousness is" relevant here in the first place? AI already can do practically everything the human brain can, and often better or at least faster. The "tipping point" arguably isn't only close, but we're practically on top of it.
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Curiously, Star Trek I think had Data intended as an artificial person, in a context where AGI is already normal. The computers are depicted with significant AI capabilities including analysis, question-answering, generation, chat interfaces, and the holodeck (their favourite toy) is substantially better than Data at human imitation. Nobody seems to be confused about it, or especially impressed. One of the holodeck episodes centres on the holodeck outwitting Data specifically, after they inadvertently prompt it to do so. Part of Data's deal is he actually has to work his way up as a fully embodied, physically limited artificial man with personal ambitions. Really interesting to view this in hindsight from 2026!
You're misremembering. The first known use of AGI was in 1997, but that was a single, mostly unknown use in one paper. It wasn't until at least a decade later that the term started entering mainstream use after being independently reinvented in the 2000s. AGI just wasn't a term in the 90s.
We called it “strong AI” in the 90s
It’s really not that confusing. The problem is people keep adding stuff to the definition that doesn’t really matter, and twisting it to serve themselves, then calling it confusing.
What really matters are the core aspects of intelligent behavior. Pattern recognition, planning, adaptation, etc.
It really doesn’t matter if an intelligent system is conscious, or how similar it is to commander data, or even how much economically viable work it can do.
There's also no consensus on the definition of AGI, so all of this discussion is moot anyway.
Ok, so what's the broadly used definition?
Artificial General Intelligence.
It means AI that is General, as in it is not specific to one narrow task, like object recognition or playing chess.
This was a hard problem for decades. No AI was general, until GPT 3 or 4. Now we have General AI.
So we have AGI.
That is part of it but the other (often implied) part is it can do general things consistently at a high level.
GPT6 will attempt to do almost any problem you can give it in text or image format and it will actually do a decent job a lot of the time. But its performance is still extremely spiky and it still makes basic mistakes and hallucinations.
So it's definitely a general artificial intelligence in some sense but it's kind of a weird one compared to the classic scifi idea
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